New utility for MultiMarkdown

Someone (I forget who — I apologize) had asked about a script to help
combine multiple MMD files into one. I wasn’t interested in writing one myself
at the time, but something came up and got me into going ahead to create one.

In other words, say you are writing a long, complex document. You may wish to
break it up into chunks (chapters, sections, whatever), where each chunk is in
a separate document. You then create one “index” document that shows how the
other pieces fit together. By changing this index file, you can easily
reorganize your document — change the order of chapters, promote a section
into a chapter, etc.

The structure of the index file is simple. Each line can contain one filename.
Blank lines are ignored. Lines starting with “#” are ignored as comments. To
indicate that a file should be “demoted” to increase header levels, simply
prefix it with the desired number of tabs (similar to the way the base header
level metadata works).

A sample index file looks like:

# This is a comment (ignored)
introduction.txt
chapter1.txt
section1.txt
section2.txt

This indicates that section1.txt and section2.txt should be “children” of
chapter1.txt.

Remember, metadata is ignored if it isn’t at the top of a file - when merging
files, only the first file can contain metadata. Because of this, it may make
sense to have the first file be a separate “metadata.txt” file that contains
only metadata….

Let me know what you think.

F-

PS> This utility has been added to the
github repository. You can get it
now, or wait for the next “official” release - I’m not sure when that might
be.